ye [OE] In deliberately quaint names such as Ye Olde Tea Shoppe, ye represents an imaginary old form of the. In the Middle Ages English used a letter called a thorn that indicated the sound of th. It looked rather like y, and came to be written in an identical way, so that the could be ye. This spelling was kept as a convenient abbreviation in handwriting down to the 19th century, and in printers’ types during the 15th and 16th centuries, but it was never pronounced as ‘ye’. The other ye was simply a regular old form of ‘you’.